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 DOMINICAN

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DOMINICAN

1 January falls respectively on Saturday and Sunday and the Dominical Letters are B and A.

This, of course, is all very simple, but the advantage of the device lies, like that of an algebraical expression, in its being a mere symbol adaptable to any year. By constructing a table of letters and days of the year, A always being set against 1 January, we can at once see the relation between the days of the week and the day of any month, if only we know the Dominical Letter. This may always be found by the following rule of De Morgan's, which gives the Dominical Letter for any year, or the second Dominical Letter if it be leap year: —

I. Add 1 to the given year. IL Take the quotient found by dividing the given

year by 4 (neglecting the remainder). in. Take 16 from the centurial figures of the given

year if that can be done. IV. Take the quotient of III divided by 4 (neg- lecting the remainder). V. From the sum of I, II, and IV, subtract III. VI. Find the remainder of V divided by 7: this is the number of the Dominical Letter, sup- posing A, B, C, D, E, F, G to be equivalent respectively to 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0. For example, to find the Dominical Letter of the year 1913:—

(I, II, IV) 1914+ 478+ 0=2392. (Ill) 19-16=3. (V) 2392-3=2389. (VI) 23S9-=-7=341, remainder 2. Therefore the Dominical Letter is E.

But the Dominical Letter had another very practi- cal use in the days before the " Ordo divini officii reci- tandi " was printed annually and when, consequently, a priest had often to determine the "Ordo" for him- self (see Directories, Catholic). As will be shown in the articles Ep.\ct and E.\ster Conthoversy, Easter Sunday may be as early as 22 March or as late as 25 April, and there are consequently thirty-five possible days on which it may fall. It is also evident that each Dominical Letter allows five possible dates for Easter Sunday. Thus, in a year whose Dominical Letter is A ( i. e. when 1 Januarj- is a Sunday), Easter must be either on 26 March, 2 April, 9 AprU, 16 April, or 23 AprU, for these are all the Sundays witliin the defined limits. But according as Easter falls on one or another of these Sundays w-e shall get a tlifferent calendar, and hence there are five, and only five, pos- sible calendars for years whose Dominical Letter is A. Similarly, there are five possible calendars for years whose Dominical Letter is B, five for C, and so on, thirty-five possible combinations in all. Now, ad- vantage was taken of this principle in the arrangement of the old Pye or directoriiim which preceded our pres- ent "Ordo". The thirty-five possible calendars were all included therein and numbered, respectively, primum A, secundum A, tertium A, etc.; primum B, secundum B, etc. Hence for anyone wishing to use the Pye the first thing to determine was the Dominical Letter of the year, and then by means of the Golden Number or the Epact, and by the aid of a simple table, to find which of the five possible calendars assigned to that Dominical Letter belonged to the year in ques- tion. Such a table as that just referred to, but adapted to the reformed calendar and in more con- venient shape, will be found at the beginning of every Breviarj' and Missal under the heading, "Tabula Pa.schalis nova reformata".

The Dominical I-etter does not seem to have been familiar to Bede in his "De Temporum Ratione", but in its place he adopts a similar device of seven num- bers which he calls concurrentes (De Temp. Rat., cap. liii). This was of Greek origin. The Concurrents are numbers denoting the day of the week on which 24 March falls in the successive years of the solar cycle, 1 standing for Sunday, 2 (Jeria secunda) for Monday,

3 for Tuesday, and so on. It is sufficient here to state that the relation between the Concurrents and the Dominical Letter is the following: —

Concurrents 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Dominical Letter F E D C B A G

Butcher, The Ecclesiastical Calendar: its Theory and Con- slniclion (Dublin, 1845); De Morgan, Companim lo the British Almanac for ISU5; Idem, The Book of Almanacs (3ti ed., Lon- don, 1907); LuNN in the appendixes to Maydeston's Z^irec/ortum Sacerdotum {Henry Bradshaw See., London, 1902), voL II, pp. 673-702; Grotefend in Grundriss der Geschichtswissen- schaft (Leipzig, 1906), vol. I, pp. 267-319; Sickel in Sitzungs- berichte of the Vienna Academy, vol. XXXVIII, pp. 200 sqq.; and especially the great work of Clavivs, Romani Calendarii a Grcgor. XIIl restituti explicaHo (Rome, 1603); and the Art de verifier les dates by the Benedictines of St-Maur, vol. I.

Herbert Thurston.

Dominican Republic, The (San Domingo, Santo Domingo), is the eastern, and much the larger, politi- cal division of the island now comprehensively known as Haiti, which is the second in size of the Greater Antilles. The territory of this republic, estimated at 18,045 square miles, is divided from that of the Re- public of Haiti, on the west, by a serpentine line run- ning from the mouth of the Ya<iui Ri^'er, on the north coast, to a point not far from Cape Beata, on the south; its northern shores are washed by the Atlantic Ocean, its southern by the Caribbean Sea, while on the east, the Mona Passage separates it from the island of Porto Rico. In proportion to its size San Domingo is much less densely settled than Haiti. Ethnologi- cally, the Dominicans contrast with the Haitians in being a Spanish-speaking people, mostly of mixed negro and European descent, the Haitians being pure negro and speaking French. The climate of San Domingo is in some parts bad, in others remarkably goo<l, notably in and around the city of San Domingo where, in spite of poor sanitation, it is said that " no- body need die of anything but old age". During the dry season (November to March) the mean diurnal variation of temperature on the south coast is from 70 to 80 degrees Fahr. ; during the rainy seasons (summer and autumn) it is from SO to 92. These figures, like most statistics of contemporary San Domingo, are necessarily conjectural.

General History. — From the date of its discovery until the era of the French Revolution the civil and the ecclesiastical history of the territory now occupied by the Dominican Republic are inseparably conjoined. In December, 1492, Christopher Columbus, having failed in his expectation of identifying the island of Cuba with Japan {Cipango), had shaped his course homeward, when the accident of the prevailing wind brought him in sight of the island which he named His- paniola (Little Spain). On 6 December, 1492, he landed at Mole St. Nicholas (now Haitian territory), then, passing along the north coast of the island to the Gulf of Samana, landed again and penetrated inland as far as the summit of Santo Cerro (Holy Hill), where, looking down upon the magnificent upland plain which he named La Vega Real, he planted a wooden cross to commemorate his discovery. His first land- ing had been unopposed, but at the eastern end of Hispaniola the Ciguayen tribe received the Spaniards with a volley of arrows, from which adventure the gulf now called Samana was named by Columbus Goljo de las Flechas (Gulf of Arrows). The island had been known to its aboriginal inliabitants as Haiti ; they were of the Arawak stock and accustomed to fight against the piratical Caribs, though themselves of a rather pacific character. That they worsliipped idols ap- pears from the fact that the first Bishop of San Do- mingo sent an idol of aboriginal workrnanship as a present to Leo X (Moroni, Dizionario, XX, s. v. Do- mingo).

The first Spanish settlement, Isabella, was on the north coast. But in 1496, when Miguel Diaz re- ported to the admiral the existence of much gold in